Multidementional arrays, need concept explanation??

Hi everyone,
today, My C prof covered multidimensional arrays...he says that, there exist, in addition to the two dimensional arrays, n-dimensional arrays.. he asks us not to pay attention to these concepts and focus only on the two dimensional model..
The problem is that i want to go deeper in C, deeper than the school program, and i guess it's crucial to understand what means to have more than two dimensional array..
PS: i can imagine what is gonna be like a three-dimensional array in reality...but how that works in memory??

You can have as many dimensions as you like [1]:

Code:

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int onedim[10];
int twodim[10][10];
int threedim[10][10][10];
int fourdim[10][10][10][10];
int fivedim[10][10][10][10][10];

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I'll leave it to you to figure out what sixdim and tendim would look like.

And tendim might struggle to fit in a 32-bit machine - care to guess why?

[1] I don't know if the C standard has a specific limit for what the compiler must cope with - if there is such a limit, it's still allowed for the compiler to allow more dimensions, if it likes to.

Edit: I missed your last question. The compiler will translate ANY multidimensional array into a block of memory that is the right size to cope with the data. How that's organized is up to the compiler, but generally it's just like a one dimensional array with index calculation like this:
n0 + n1 * n0_max + n2 * (n0_max * n1_max) ...

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Mats

Ok, so you wanna say that the compiler breaks everything down to only two dimensions..??

the compiler breaks all multidimensional arrays to one dimension, not two. So it's just a bunch of array elements in a row, and it calculates the position you want.

very interesting, I to was wondering this some time back. It's good to have an insight.

Quote:

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n0 + n1 * n0_max + n2 * (n0_max * n1_max) ...

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